Louis Legrand was a mater of the aquatint technique.
Born at Dijon on September 29th, 1863, he was employed as a bank
clerk until he was twenty, though his desire to become an artist was such that
he studied at the Dijon Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the evenings and in his spare
time. In 1883 he won the Devosge Prize at the school, and left for Paris the
following year.

Soon after his arrival in Paris Legrand began to
study etching and engraving techniques with Felicien Rops. His first commission
in 1884 was a set of four etchings for a series of volumes called Les
Premieres Illustrees, to which Steinlen and Willette later also contributed.
The following year he executed eight etchings for a novel by Joseph Gayda, Ce
Brigand d’Amour from the same publisher, E. Monnier. Clumsy and
amateurish, these show little promise of what was to come. They were, however,
the start of a long apprenticeship for Legrand. In the difficult years that
followed he supplied a few drawings to such periodicals as La Journee and
the Journal Amusant, but he lived mostly on the revenue from drawings he
executed for children’s pulp magazines. In 1887 he joined the Courrier
Francais alongside Forain, Willette, Henri Pille and Heidbrink, contributing
a drawing to each weekly issue over the following five years. The publication
expected cynical humor with erotic overtones. Legrand’s drawings were
rarely funny. Instead of supplying straightforward cartoons he supplied powerful
drawings with strong, harsh lines emphasizing the death and disease that awaited
the prostitute and her client, rather than the fun and games. These drawings
already showed Legrand’s preoccupation: Rops pointed out that Legrand had
“un amour extraordinaire du modele” (an extraordinary love for the
sculptured) and in another remark said, “What a man, that Legrand, he
would find angles in a billiard ball.”

Prostitutes, errand girls, peasants, and even
political comment poured from Legrand’s pen. Two drawings brought him
trouble. One called Prostitution, was a mildly Ropsian bit of Symbolism
showing a rather silly nude girl in the clutch of a black monster with an old
woman’s face and clawed paws. The other was an equally mild satire on the
naturalism of Emile Zola, showing the novelist myopically examining a
woman’s thighs. Taken to court for obscenity, Legrand was defended by
Eugene Rodrigues, a fine lawyer, friend and later biographer of Rops. He was
acquitted, but the public prosecutor appealed and, despite Rodrigues’
eloquence, Legrand was found guilty. Refusing to pay the fine, he was briefly
incarcerated in the Sainte-Pelagie gaol. This spell in gaol convinced Legrand
that the life of a satirical journalist was not for him. Though he lived in
Montmartre he, like Steinlen, lived a bourgeois existence, enjoying the wit and
humor of the Chat Noir without plunging into the debauched amusements that
Toulouse-Lautrec and Bottini found so amusing.

Rodrigues, who wrote articles and chronicles under
the pseudonym Erastene Ramiro, had written a commentary on the cancan and its
principal exponents, as well as details on the hard training those dancers had
to undergo. The Gil Blas magazine published an illustrated supplement,
the Gil Blas Illustre from May 1891 onwards, devoting its first two
issues to the Rodrigues text with illustrations in color by Legrand. An
unprecedented 60,000 copies were printed and sold out immediately.
Legrand’s fame began to spread. The Gil Blas illustrations had been
reproductions of watercolors. The publisher Dentu persuaded Legrand to etch
these compositions, and these were issued the following year in a book called
Le Cours de Danse Fin de Siecle (Turn of the Century Dance Classes) with
a revised text by Ramiro.

Legrand had, in the meantime, gone to Brittany for a
holiday, which was to signal the break with his Courrier Francais past.
The last link was a set of seventeen etchings of subjects he had earlier drawn
for the magazine. On his return he executed fourteen lithographs inspired by
Brittany: fisher folk, peasants, market day. The set, called Au Cap de la
Chevre (At the Goat’s Promontory) was published by Gustave
Pellet.

Pellet was to be Legrand’s friend and
publisher for the rest of his life. Born in 1859, Pellet came from a wealthy
family, and spent his youth and young manhood in travel and pursuing his hobby
of accumulating a fine library. A financial crash in 1886 destroyed his family
fortunes. Faced with the necessity of earning a living he opened a bookshop on
the quai Voltaire and began dispersing his collection. He soon decided to
diversify into pictures and graphics, and determined to publish original prints.
His first artist was Louis Legrand, of whom he was to publish some three hundred
etchings. He was also to publish Alexandre Lunois, Charles Maurin, Raffaelli and
some of Toulouse-Lautrec’s most beautiful color lithographs, as well as
many lithographs and etchings by Odilon Redon, Signac and Luce. When Rops sold
the reproduction rights of his graphics shortly before his death, Pellet bought
those rights and eventually published some four hundred Rops etchings, many of
them engraved by Bertrand. Though highly successful as a publisher, Pellet was
also a collector, and Legrand his favorite. It was said that the only place to
see Legrand’s pastels was in Pellet’s home, for the publisher could
not bear to part with them, and bought nearly all for himself.

Legrand was principally a graphic artist, though he
also painted, exhibiting paintings at the Salon of the Societe Nationale des
Beaux-Arts from 1902 onwards. After his Breton lithographs he hardly ever
returned to the medium. His favorite was the aquatint, in monochrome or in
color, which gave him all the flexibility he needed, with touches of etching,
drypoint, roulette and burnishing to obtain luminous highlights and astonishing
effects.

Many of Legrand’s subjects are taken from
Parisian nightlife, the bars, whorehouses, music halls, but he also reveals a
strange mystical streak, which made him engrave a series of religious subjects.
A large figure of Christ bore his own features, while a composition called Le
Fils du Charpentier (The Carpenter’s Son) showed his wife and son.
Indeed, his wife and son were the models for many plates. The Livre
d’Heures (Book of Hours) published by Pellet in 1898, was a
compilation of prayers, songs of devotion, curious medieval texts, etching and
two hundred drawings, which went from the conventionally devout to Ropsian
demonology and to some very amusing illustrations. Several contemporary critics
saw in him a Burgundian Primitive but his technique and sureness is far too
sophisticated for that. He undoubtedly had a certain innocence of vision which
occasionally dropped him on the wrong side of sentimentality, but that is
largely because we are more cynical than his contemporaries.

After completing his series on the cancan Legrand
turned to the world of ballet. He spent a great deal of time in the wings and in
the rehearsal rooms over a number of years, producing a number of individual
aquatints, drawings and pastels as well as two major albums. The first was
Les Petites du Ballet (The Little Ones of Ballet), thirteen aquatints and
a cover published in 1893. These showed the evolution of the would-be
ballerinas, from timid arrival for the first lesson accompanied by a black clad
mother; through familiarity, companionship and hard exercise; to putting on and
taking off their tutus and an appearance in a scene from an imaginary ballet.
The second album appeared in 1908. La Petite Classe consisted of twelve
large plates and a cover, dealing this time with the actual performers, from the
very young girl wiser in her ways of stage-door johnnies than her years, to the
rehearsal rooms, the girls unwinding before a performance, flirting, going to
class, becoming a prima ballerina and, at last, making an entrance on stage.
Legrand’s ballet plates form a delicious body of work, in which the girls,
however tired or tense, are never ungraceful whether sitting, standing,
dressing, or at their exercises. Curiously enough Legrand never drew an actual
performance. As with the cancan, it was the effort behind the performance that
appealed to him.

Legrand’s first major one-man show comprising
two hundred works was held in 1896 at Samuel Bing’s L’Art Nouveau
gallery. Bing had been one of the leading dealers in Far Eastern works of art
before transforming his gallery into one dealing in every aspect of fine and
decorative arts in the style to which he gave the name. That same year Floury
published a catalogue raisonne of Legrand’s work to date, one hundred
twelve original etchings, aquatints and lithographs. It had been compiled and
written by Romiro, and Legrand had etched six new etchings for it, including a
self-portrait for the cover, which he dedicated “to Eug. Rodrigues, my
best friend”.

At the 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris, Legrand
was awarded a Silver Medal. In 1904 a second important one-man show was held at
the Galerie Georges Petit, where he exhibited sixteen paintings, twenty-eight
pastels, sixty drawings, seven leather bindings, some miniatures and forty-nine
etchings. Two years later he was awarded the Legion d’Honneur. In 1911
came a major retrospective exhibition, when his complete graphic works were
shown at the Palais des Modes, while paintings, pastels and drawings were
exhibited at the Durand-Ruel Gallery. Throughout this part of his career a vast
number of articles were published praising his work from the pens of Roger Marx,
Louis Morin, Clement-Janin, Michel Zevaco, Gustave Coquiot, Gabriel Mourey,
Camille Mauclair and any others. The magazine L’Art et le Beau (Art
and Beauty) devoted a complete issue to him in 1908, written by Gustave Kahn,
which also appeared in a German edition published by Otto Beckmann Verlag in
Berlin. Two years later Mauclair published a two hundred seventy-four page
monograph on Legrand, which included a summary list of his graphic work to
date.

Legrand continued to produce a number of books,
though he only twice illustrated in the conventional sense: Cinq Contes
Parisiens (Five Parisian Tales) by Guy de Maupassant in 1905 and Quinze
Histoires d’Edgar Poe (Fifteen Stories by Edgar Poe) in 1897, the
former commissioned by the Societe des Cent Bibliophiles, of which Rodrigues was
a founder and the president. In 1901 Pellet published La Faune Parisienne
(Parisian Fauna), a set of twenty etchings and aquatints, mostly in color, with
a text by Ramiro. In 1904 he produced twenty-six etching to illustrate some
short stories by Hughes Rebell, but these were never published. In 1909 Pellet
issued a new album of eight etchings and a cover under the title Les
Bars, in which Legrand returned to the scenes of dissipation. In 1914 Pellet
published Poems a L’Eau Forte (Etched Poems), for which Legrand
produced thirty etchings and aquatints to accompany some of his favorite
poems.

The years that followed the war of 1914-1918 saw
Legrand withdraw into his family. His old friend and publisher Pellet died in
1919, leaving his gallery to his son-in-law, Maurice Exsteens. Though the latter
continued to exhibit Legrand’s work, there was a gap of years between the
two men. Exsteens was to write and published a four-volume catalogue of the
works of Rops. His catalogue of the works of Legrand was never finished or
published. Legrand continued to etch and draw, occasionally sending some
paintings to the Salons of the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Though he had
published drawings and etchings of the Moulin Rouge, of the cancan and of the
girls of Montmartre before Lautrec, the latter’s romantically brief and
turbulent life had created a legend around his splendid works: even
Legrand’s admirers frequently ignored the fact that he was a precursor,
not a follower of Lautrec’s. Pierre Varenne, writing in 1922, exclaimed:
Life is the admirable Louis Legrand, one of the most moving artists of our time.
One does not, perhaps, realize this enough. Since Toulouse-Lautrec no other
painter has more faithfully described woman’s complex soul...What mastery
and tact!”

Legrand supplied a few etchings for a couple of
books in the 1920s, but his last major undertaking was a series of forty-six
etchings, aquatints and drawings to accompany a text in prose and verse entitled
Elles describing various girls, which Francis Carco had written
especially for the purpose. The book was published in 1931 by another friend,
Henri Prost.

The Depression was, however, taking its toll. The
day of the limited edition book was over for many years. Legrand retired to the
country, still occasionally producing some etchings, often of old friends. One
of these unfinished etchings includes a caricature of Hitler, Joan of Arc, and
an archbishop. He survived the Second World War, and died at Livry-Gargan in
1951 in total obscurity.